Over the last few years, I’ve asked students and friends to send me their turkey cooking data. In particular, I ask for the time and temperature of the cooking, along with the weight of the turkey. I also add a place for extra notes, like how the turkey was prepared, if it was cooked in something besides an oven (e.g., a deep fryer or smoker), if it was stuff, covered, or otherwise modified.

This is imperfect, because everyone has all kinds of variations and conditions and measurement imperfections. But here’s a collection of data, mostly from 2020, but also from a few years past:

I’ll explain some details:

1. I used most of the data I was given. Some submissions had numbers that were in the wrong units or just typos. I didn’t rule out too much, but if there was something that approximated the surface temperature of the sun or would have taken 4 years or would have killed an entire family, I discarded it. There weren’t too many in this camp, though. Fortunately. There probably are still some errors in here, because, well: science, meet real world conditions. 5th graders deal with this in science fair, so we might as well be brave enough to face it here.
2. There are different methods of cooking all mixed together, and the people who used stuffing are mixed in with the non-stuffing people. That definitely causes scatter. But as I stare at this I think it’s less of an issue than I’d thought at first. It helps to have a lot of data.
3. And there are different cooking temperatures. I highlighted the low temperatures (under 300 degress F) as blue, and the high temperatures (400+ degrees F) as red. And you see where they generally fall: red dots, with more thermal energy around the turkey, take less time than the general trend, and the blue dots, with less energy around the turkey, take more time than the trend.
4. Most important, in spite of all all those weirdities, you can see there’s a definite trend: Bigger turkeys take longer to cook, but not in a linear fashion. My friend and very good physicist, Colin Inglefield, gave an entire physics seminar on this very thing several years ago, and now I have empirical data to help him out. If you’re interested, the Exploratorium walks through a nice explanation of this non-linear relationship, here:
   https://www.exploratorium.edu/food/perfect-turkey

Thanks to all of you who contributed data and/or asked others to submit data. I’ll continue to do this and potentially update this page as results pour in each year.